Earlier this month, there was yet another lengthy public debate about Upworthy, the two-year-old publisher that has become one of the most popular sites on Facebook due to its knack for overselling its bite-size content with "curiosity gap" headlines like, "Why Is Bill Nye Acting Like A Lunatic? Because He Doesn't Want To Get Blown Up, That's Why."

In the midst of the Twitter argument, Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, which measures real-time traffic for sites like Upworthy, dropped a bomb: "We've found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading," he wrote.